Many people following the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic were curious as to why they focused on humanoid-like races rather than have a wide variety of exotic races from the Star Wars Universe. Well, we now have an answer from game writer, Alex Freed, who chatted with VideoGamer.com about the issue.
Freed indicated that one of the main reasons was “relatability” for gamers.
"You know, the reason for our humanoid range of species, it's a matter of relatability to a large degree. The further you get from human the more difficult it is for players to get into their mindset, the more difficult it is for all the other characters in the game to relate to them the same way. There are enormous technical obstacles, there is building all the lip synching, all the emotion into the face of the human is incredibly difficult and time consuming, doing that for something like a Wookiee – and we couldn't half do it, we couldn't let Wookiees be only a third as expressive as humans. At that point we're just giving up.”
"We're building a game designed to do these things, we can't do it in half measures. Same with customising appearances. Adding one dramatically different alien, we still need as much variety as we would need for humans. Between the relatability aspect and the technical aspect it seems best to focus on what Star Wars has always done best which is people who look like us."
He also commented that if a particular race didn’t have a good story behind it, it wouldn’t be worth playing.
"I think what a lot of those people are into is the fact that they are strange and different. So if we can't pull that off in the storytelling. If we can't make you feel like yes, you are a Wookiee, everyone is going to look at you differently than if you were human, your entire background is going to be very different, that's going to shape everything you do differently. If you were doing humans with Wookiee masks in the story then I don't think it's going to satisfy most of the people who are going to play Wookiee.
"It's not the aesthetic of it, it's the whole package. It's being the barbarian from some planet who is stronger and wilder than everyone else and who is only half understood. That's what people love about Wookiees. We don't have anything against that storytelling, it's not a moral opposition to not having inhuman characters but in order to do it right you need to write a story around that character."
Chiss, Cyborg, Human, Miraluka, Mirialan, Rattataki, Sith Pureblood, Twi'lek, and Zabrak are the current playable races.
